V

'Mental raft of a world,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, trying over the doubtful phrase. 'Mental raft of a world!' Keppel looked at his friend with an expression in his twisted dissimilar eyes, half defensive and half affectionate. 'Well, isn't it?' he said.

'What's wrong with it?' said the doctor. 'Don't answer me: "Everything." Be specific. What's wrong with the raft? What's your case, Keppel? I'd like to have it clearer.'

'Well,' said Keppel, and gathered his forces. 'It's a half–born mind as yet. Yes—yours, mine, and everybody's. Half born like a very young foal, encumbered by the foetal membranes it can't shake off yet. It is blundering about, half blinded and squinting. All our philosophies, the best, are no better than that. Especially—'

'Especially?'

'There is this secondary world which has worked its way into the language everywhere, a sort of fold in the membrane that has established itself in a thousand metaphors, got itself most unwarrantably taken for granted by nearly everybody. Other worldliness, the idea of a ghost world, a spirit world, side by side with actuality. It overlaps and lies beside reality, like it and yet different; a parody of it done in phantoms; a sort of fuddled overlap; a universe of imaginary emanations, the consequence of congenital squint. Beside every man we see his spirit—which is not really there—beside the universe we imagine a Great Spirit. Whenever the mental going is a bit hard, whenever our intellectual eyes feel the glare of truth, we lose focus and slither off into Ghostland. Ghostland is halfway to dreamland, where all rational checks are lost. In Ghostland, that world of the spirit, you can find unlimited justifications for your impulses; unlimited evasions from rational obligation. That’s my main charge against the human mind; this persistent confusing dualism. The last achievement of the human mind is to see life simply and see it whole,'

('That boy at Gorpel,' reflected Davis.)

'But we're getting it straighter now,' said the doctor,

'We've got new influences coming in,' said Davis.

'But that isn't all,' said Keppel, ignoring those new influences. 'There are other things wrong with the silly creature.'

'Homo sapiens,' whispered the doctor.

'Homo superbus, I suggest.'

'Let's have the full indictment.'

'The creature hardly ever becomes adult. Hardly any of us grow up fully. Particularly do we dread and shirk complete personal responsibility—which is what being adult means. Man is the boy who won't grow up, but he grows monstrous clumsy and heavy at times all the same, a Goering monster, a Mussolini—the bouncing boys of Europe. Most of us to the very end of our lives are obsessed by infantile cravings for protection and direction, and out of these cravings come all these impulses towards slavish subjection to gods, kings, leaders, heroes, bosses, mystical personifications like the People, My Country Right or Wrong, the Church, the Party, the Masses, the Proletariat. Our imaginations hang on to some such Big Brother idea almost to the end. We will accept almost any self–abasement rather than step out of the crowd and be full–grown individuals. And like all cubs and puppies and larval things, we are full of fear. What is the Sense of Sin but the instinctive fear of an immature animal? Oh, we are doing wrong! We are going to be punished for it! We are full of fears, fears of primal curses and mystical sin, masochistic impulses to sacrifice and propitiate and kneel and crawl. It paralyses our happiest impulses. It fills our world with mean, cruel, and crazy acts.

'And what isn't purely infantile in us is at best early adolescent. Our excess of egotism! We all have it. It is a commonplace to say man is as over–sexed as a cageful of monkeys, but sex is only one manifestation of his stupendous egotism. In every respect he is insanely self–centred—beyond any biological need. No animal, not even a dog, has the acute self–consciousness, the incessant, sore, personal jealousy of a human being. Fear is linked to this—there is no clear boundary here—and so is the hoarding instinct. The love of property for its own sake comes straight out of fear. This terrified, immature thing wants to be safe, invincibly safe, and so, by the most natural transition, fear develops into the craving for possessions and the craving for power. From the escape defensive to the aggressive defensive is a step. He not only fears other beings, he hates them, he flies at them. He fights needlessly. He is cruel. He loves to conquer. He loves to persecute…. Man! What was it Swift said? That such a creature should deal in pride!'

'Homo superbus, eh?' said the doctor. 'But listen, Keppel. Is he really so bad as all this? Just a scared, self–defensive, immature beast squinting at the world because he has never yet learned to look straight? And hopeless at that? You experimental psychologists have been cleaning up our ideas about the human mind very fast in the past thirty or forty years. Very fast. You have been making this damaging—well, this salutary—analysis of our motives and errors—our queer little ways. Yes…. You couldn't have said a word of this forty years ago…. In my profession we say a sound diagnosis is halfway to a cure. Indicating the human mind is like sending a patient to bed for treatment. Maybe the treatment begins at that.'

'Well?' said Keppel.

'Isn't the time almost ripe for a new education that would clear the stuff from the creature's eyes, stiffen his backbone, teach him to think straight and grow up? Make a man of him at last?'

Davis shook his head. He spoke rather to himself than to the others. 'Man is what we've got. Humanity is humanity. Starry souls are born not made.'